New Delhi: Accusing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of treating him and his father, Chaudhary Birender Singh — who had stop the Congress to affix the BJP in 2014 — as “outsiders”, Hisar MP Brijendra Singh has stated the BJP doesn’t “adopt you”.
An IAS officer-turned-politician who was elected to the Lok Sabha from Hisar in 2019, Brijendra Singh stop the BJP to be a part of the Congress Sunday.
In an interview with ThePrint, he stated that he had been feeling uncomfortable throughout the BJP on account of a number of points, together with the farmers’ agitation for a authorized assure of the minimal help worth (MSP), the Agnipath army recruitment scheme and the central authorities’s dealing with of the ladies wrestlers’ protest.
“The BJP has a very structured, cadre-based system. My father, who joined in 2014, and I, who joined in 2019, are still considered outsiders in the party. It’s not as if they (BJP) adopt you in that sense in which you expect. So there were three to four things,” Singh stated.
He stated that he has no “personal issues” with anybody within the BJP “whether it’s the top leadership or my colleagues in Parliament”.
“It’s just that the kind of education that I’ve had, the kind of cultural and social setting of which I’m a part, in which education had a great role to play… and so the ideas and not strictly ideology, but the ideals which I have, which I held dear — we were just kind of not very comfortable. So the compatibility issues were there, which I felt right in the beginning,” he added.
A 1998-batch IAS officer of the Haryana cadre, Brijendra Singh took voluntary retirement to contest the 2019 Lok Sabha elections from Hisar. He went on to defeat the Jannayak Janta Party’s (JJP) Dushyant Chautala and Bhavya Bishnoi, who was then with the Congress.
Emphasising the truth that he was “born and brought up” throughout the Congress tradition, Singh determined to affix the occasion lastly.
The Hisar MP additionally praised Congress chief Rahul Gandhi and his Bharat Jodo Yatra.
“Rahul Gandhi and I studied at St. Stephen’s College, we were classmates. So I never was under the illusion that he is what people portray him to be. I have always found Rahul Gandhi to be a well-read and sensitive person,” he stated.
Singh stated the Bharat Jodo Yatra modified Rahul as an individual.
“My first trigger (when I almost jumped the ship) so to say, was during the last Bharat Jodo Yatra. Because I really felt that was a defining moment for him (Rahul Gandhi) as a person, for him as a political person and for the Congress party’s revival. It is something that people perhaps will fairly assess sometime later, maybe not right now. And so that’s when he finally came across as someone who was serious,” he added.
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‘Not given opportunity to raise farm laws issue’
After Singh was elected from Hisar, father Birender Singh — who was a Union minister throughout Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first time period from 2014 to 2019 — resigned from the Rajya Sabha in January 2020.
Many had then stated that this was consistent with the BJP’s “one family, one post” coverage.
Brijendra Singh stated that whereas in Parliament he acquired many alternatives to talk on a number of “critical” points as he was additionally part of the Parliamentary standing committees, particularly the Public Accounts Committee, and the Committee of Defence. However, he was not given the chance to lift a number of points, together with the farm legal guidelines, in Parliament, he stated.
The Hisar MP stated, whereas he didn’t work together with PM Modi throughout his stint within the BJP, “what one has seen of him, he is a hard worker.”
“There is no doubt about it, I mean, and I’m sure every prime minister of India, if you are at the helm of affairs of a country of this size and this diversity, you have to be hard working. You can’t be relaxed and just wish everything would go fine. So, yes, he is very hard-working,” he stated.
He added that the PM’s thoughts is “constantly ticking”. “It’s not as if his mind rests in that sense. He’s always looking at things, thinking of solutions and wants to get work done.”
The Hisar MP additionally stated that the BJP-JJP alliance in Haryana was one other critical friction level.
In October, Birender Singh issued an ultimatum that he would stop the BJP if it continued its alliance with the JJP in Haryana.
In 2019, Brijendra Singh defeated Chautala and Bishnoi. However, with the JJP being an alliance accomplice of the BJP and Bishnoi and his father Kuldeep Bishnoi additionally being part of the BJP, Birender Singh was not sure of his son getting a Lok Sabha ticket.
(Edited by Richa Mishra)
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